Somewhere in the tillage fields of Mylerstown, Co. Kildare, a faint circular outline in the landscape marks the remains of an early medieval farmstead that has been quietly disappearing for centuries. The site is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was the most common form of rural settlement in Ireland from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century. These were typically enclosed farmsteads surrounded by one or more earthen banks and ditches, home to a single family and their livestock. What survives at Mylerstown is modest: a slightly raised, densely overgrown circular area with an internal diameter of around 33 metres, its identity as a former enclosure still legible, if only just.

The defining feature that originally bounded this enclosure was a fosse, a defensive or enclosing ditch, which here measured roughly 3.2 metres wide and 1.8 metres deep. That fosse has long since been pressed into agricultural service, recut at some point to function as a field drain, a fate common to earthworks that happened to follow a useful line across farmland. The interior of the ring has fared no better. According to local information, field boundaries to the north and east were levelled in 1985, and the cleared material was deposited inside the old enclosure, burying whatever ground surface remained. A gap of about 5.7 metres in the northwest of the circuit appears to be a modern break rather than an original entrance. The site sits on a gentle east-facing slope, and while it is barely visible on the ground, it can be made out on aerial photography from 2005, the characteristic circular cropmark still faintly readable from above.